Vampus (Saturnino García, El Dia de la Bestia) digs graves up night for bodies that he opens at night and feeds the interned remains to his pet Toby. And when he’s not doing that, he’s telling stories of horror to you, the viewer. Each of the four horror stories in Vampus Horror Tales are directed by a different first time filmmaker with the wraparound directed by Víctor Matellano and co-writers Victoria Vázquez and Diego Arjona.

“La Boda” is directed and written by Manuel Martínez and is all about the bride Marta and the best man Santi finding themselves trapped in a basement as he attempts to get her to leave the groom at the altar. “Cumpleaños” directed by Erika Elizalde and written by Ignacio López has another couple, Arlin and Daniela trapped inside a carnival ride. “Segunda Cita,” directed and written by Isaac Berrocal, has the blind Margot (Erika Sanz) being menaced by Alex (Nacho Guerreros) on a date at his county house. “Linaje,” by director and writer Piter Moreira, has Marcos (Federico Repetto) dealing with keeping his newly vampiric wife (Vicky Jorge) hidden and fed during a pandemic created by tainted hot dogs.

Inspired by Spanish horror comics and movies of the past, this isn’t perfect — no anthology is — but I was overjoyed to see Paul Naschy (Ignacio López) make an appearance as well as Franco regular Antonio Mayans. I really loved the cannibalistic and dark humored Vampus way more than the stories he tells, which seem to rely on basic horror ideas instead of the self-aware nature of the bookend segments. That said, I like the choice to have everything in black and white. This is still much better — even as it is imperfect — than so many streaming anthologies.

Vampus Horror Tales is available on demand and on digital from Uncork’d Entertainment.

As a global war begins to burn itself out, a young filmmaker named Diane (Alexandra Slade) is trapped in a military bunker with the increasingly unhinged General Gore (Nick Young). That’s a simple explanation for this film’s plot but it gets much stranger than that sentence.

Director and writer Brian Patrick Butler has made something that lives up to its prophetic tagline: Just because you are saved, doesn’t mean you’re safe. This is neither all comedy or all horror or all political but all those things jammed into a cocktail of so many more ingredients, like body horror and the stated influences of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.

What starts in a bunker filled with dead bodies and ends up with the two diametrically opposed characters finally engaging in conflict, this movie gets absolutely wild and does so in a black and white look that is positively jarring and, of course, causes one to think of the Twilight Zone but here it’s a positive connection. Or propaganda films, which this movie goes out of its way to show the two sides of.

In just fifty minutes, this gets some big ideas out there and has two leads who are more than up to the task of the heavy dialogue they’ve been given. This is definitely worth watching, as is where Butler takes his career next.

You can watch Friend of the World on Troma Now and Tubi.

I missed this when it first came out and I’ve always had it on my list, wondering what it was about. Once the sequel, Becky 2: The Wrath of Becky, I figured it was time to see a movie I lost track of during the pandemic.

I’ve gone on record saying that I’ve overcome all manner of violence in my life and never thought twice about it, but still remember mean things preteen girls would say decades ago. Becky (Lulu Wilson, who is great in everything she’s been in, including The Haunting of Hill House, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Annabelle: Creation and Deliver Us From Evil) is a young woman bullied in school and still struggling to get over the loss of her mother. Somehow, all that pain doesn’t come out as mean words but as the kind of violence usually reserved for male action stars.

Her father Jeff (Joel McHale) takes her to his cabin for the weekend in the hopes of reconnecting and getting her to like his new fiancee — well, that’s a surprise for her — Kayla (Amanda Brugel, Jason X) and her son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). That doesn’t last long, as a gang of Neo-Nazis led by Dominick Lewis (an incredible Kevin James; the role was meant for Simon Pegg but wow, James is astounding) that includes Roman Hammond (James McDougall), Sonny Cole (Ryan McDonald) and the monstrous Wallace “Apex” Landham (Robert Maillet, who wrestled in WWE as Kurrgan) come to the home, kill one of the family’s two dogs and demand a key that Becky keeps in her treehouse fort. This McGuffin is said by Lewis to be part of his master plan that he’s spent a decade in jail putting together and that it will unlock everything for him and his people. He even has it tattooed on his body. And no, that key is never explained. It’s just the device that starts a 13-year-old girl on the path of bloody vengeance against a gang of men larger, tougher and more frightening — well, not for long — than her.

I was shocked by how hard this movie goes and loved every minute of it. I mean, did I think that I’d see a movie where a young girl goes Fulci on the King of Queens when it started? No, I was not. This movie is packed with grisly and imaginative doses of pure violence and kept me in the whole time, even if the opening and closing police moments are pointless. Yet when the movie gets to Wilson cosplaying First Blood, this movie doesn’t just sing. It screams its head off.

Co-directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion also made Cooties together, while writers Ruckus and Lane Skye were also behind The Devil to Pay and Rattle the Cage. Nick Morris, an executive producer, also worked on the script.

The Ronin Flix blu ray release of Becky has introductions from directors Jonathan Millet and Cary Murnion, a featurette about directing the film, interviews with McHale and Wilson, fan art, behind the scenes photos and commentary with Wilson and screenwriters Ruckus and Lane Skye. You can get it from Ronin Flix and MVD.

This movie was co-directed by Ross Snyder and William Hellfire, who worked for Gary Whitson, the founder of W.A.V.E. Productions, in the 90s and was astounded to learn in 2016 that his old boss was still making his strange films. He pitched him on the idea for this and Whitson gave him full access to all of his movies as well as the people who made — and still make — them on spec.

That’s right. If there’s a horror movie you want to see or more to the point, a death or struggling scene with an attractive actress, W.A.V.E. will film it for you with our their actresses, including Clancy McCauley, Debbie D., Laura Giglio, Deanna Demko, Pamela Sutch and Tina Krause, who all appear in the film.

If you have any love for SOV — I mean, this site just spent nearly three weeks on these movies, so if you’re reading this, you might — this has so may folks show up like Goregasm director High Gallagher, Tempe Video’s J.R. Bookwalter, the guys from Bleeding Skull and Lunchmeat and nearly everyone else associated with W.A.V.E.

There’s also great footage from old Chiller Theater conventions, Debbie D. on The Joe Franklin Show and most of the cast laughing about both the silliness of so many of the movies and the conditions that they were made under.

This movie has no judgment for the films that W.A.V.E. creates and is so good natured about movies that are basically just about women being stabbed, strangled, drowned and even devoured by a giant woman in Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge. Instead, these sleazy movies seem to be made by a strange family of sorts that ended up creating outsider art, if outsider art made several films devoted to women in quicksand.

Man, instead of talking head horror docs that tell us everything we want to know about safe subjects, more people need to go all in on the dark alleys of the genre. This movie is incredible.

You can get this from Saturn’s Core, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome. You can also watch it on Tubi.

In director and writer Keith Boynton’s The Scottish Play, Sydney (Tina Benko) decides to escape the big world of Hollywood by heading to New England and acting in a Shakespeare festival. She likes her leading man Hugh (Geraint Wyn Davies) and gets along with the director Adam (Peter Mark Kendall). And then she meets William Shakespeare himself (Will Brill), who reveals to her that the curse of Macbeth is all the fault of his ghost, as he was never happy with what he wrote. He’ll leave her production alone if she’s open to some rewrites, however.

If you told me that this would be a movie that I’d find fun, funny and charming before I saw it, I’d have called you a fool. But after watching it — actually I wouldn’t be that rude, but I wouldn’t expect to like this — I really fell for it. It’s a cute little concept, told well by a good cast and an interesting script.

I like the idea that someone from the outside — not knowing that the bard himself was writing the new version — would be upset that someone was messing with Macbeth. That’s the conflict that drives this film, as well as gives an actress the chance to meet the playwright that inspired so many stories of his own.

Deaf Crocodile Films — who released the amazing Solomon King on blu ray this year — has also released four feature films by acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri on demand for U.S. audiences.  The four films will be available on Amazon, iTunes and Projectr and tell the stories of aerial killers, kite flyers, vampires and arsonists who disappear into time. You can also buy the blu ray box set from Deaf Crocodile.

Careless Crime (Jenayat-e Bi Deghat) (2020): Inspired by the Cinema Rex fire in 1978 that triggered the Iranian Revolution, this movie follows three different paths: arsonists planning the fire, the students at the cinema interacting with the employees of the theater and the characters on the screen of the movie that played that night. The crime that was committed that night was so horrible that it literally burns through the reality that unites these three storylines.

The night Cinema Rex burned — one of the biggest terrorist attacks in Iran for decades — The Deer was playing. Two women attempt to play that same film in the desert in another storyline as they come across soldiers who have discovered an unexploded munition from another conflict in the past.

The theme of carelessness is carried through by so many in this, as many of the terrorists believed that the audience would just rush out and be unharmed and their message would be heard. Yet the theater manager oversold tickets to the show and his greed is just as responsible for the deaths.

This is a movie that is historical beyond true crime while also telling of the world of film. It may get repetitive and a little long at two hours and twenty minutes, but wow, those last twenty minutes make up for it. You won’t just know about what happened. You will feel it.

Fish & Cat (Mahi Va Gorbeh) (2013): In the Caspian region, students have gathered for a kite-flying event during the winter solstice. Next to their camp is a small hut occupied by three cooks who work at a nearby restaurant, a place that serves human meat on the menu. Meanwhile, the space-time loop within this film both gives away the ending and also makes it seem suspenseful at the same time. And here’s one more thing that makes this break from the pack: The entire movie is one single 140-minute take.

Director Shahram Mokri said, “I like the paintings of Maurits Escher, where you can see a change in perspective in the same visual. In my film, I wanted to give a change in perspective of time in one single shot. So the idea for the film came from his paintings.”

Consider this an Iranian Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet one where we don’t see the horror of cannibalism yet feel it even more, if that’s possible. What a wild film.

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring And Other Stories (Ashkan, Angoshtar-e Motebarek Va Dastan-haye Digar) (2008): Mokri’s first feature was a black and white comedy about fate that, yes, has the feel of Tarantino yet establishes the director’s own voice as it tells the tales of blind jewel thieves Shahrooz and Reza; Askhan, a man who can’t quite seem to commit suicide, some cops, some hitmen, a young couple who wants to run away to get married, the boy’s angry father, art dealers, two female morgue attendants and, oh yeah, a fish on the loose and a missing ring.

Beyond Tarantino, there are moments that feel like film noir and others that reference Jim Jarmusch. Remember when Crash or Magnolia or any of those post-Quentin movies where everyone’s connected seemed to be every other movie? Sure, this is like that, but it also has an episodic nature and fun edge that makes it stand out from also-rans like Eight Heads In a Duffle Bag.

I know that Mokri made shorts before this, but it’s pretty amazing that this was his first full-length movie.

Invasion (Hojoom)(2017): I can honestly say I’ve never seen another movie like this and it was absolutely astounding.

The sales copy for this describes it as “a science-fiction/detective/vampire story, with nods to stylized 1980s New Wave-era films like Liquid Sky” and yeah, that’s almost as close as I can come to figuring out how to explain it to you.

At some time somewhere in the future, teams of tattooed athletes play a never explained sport in a foreboding and dangerous stadium where a murder has already taken place. The police have been trying to reconstruct the crime over and over again, using the vampiric twin sister of the married man in his place. There’s also a way too long eclipse and a global pandemic happening all at the same time.

I mean, this movie also has the one shot technique of Fish & Cat while also looking like a grimy 70s science fiction horror movie — Thirst maybe? — along with way too much fog and the red-eyed, face-tattooed and androgynous female vampire Negar gliding through all of this. Did Ali kill her brother, his best friend Saman? What’s up with the way he poses in front of the mirror in the beginning? What’s up with all those no gender mixing warning signs? Were Saman and Negar the same person when it comes down to it or were they really just switching lives and souls? How can an Iranian film made in 2017 feel so much like Jean Rollin or Jess Franco?

And most importantly, why did it take me so long to find this? Absolutely essential.

I was let down, as I believed that A Karate Christmas Miracle was a singular work of a hundred monkeys in a room with a hundred typewriters for a hundred years, but this is just the same story beats transposed into a different tale: Mario Del Vecchio is not a karate student this time, but instead Kace Gabriel, the son of legendary Olympic wrestler Ajax Gabriel (writer and producer, as well as father, Kenneth Del Vecchio), is such a good wrestler — a point hammered home by promo and video of the preteen dominating other kids — that he decides to retire and fulfill his life’s goal. That goal? Make a movie so funny that it wakes his best friend Charlie (Vaughn Harrison Oberhuber) from his coma.

All the players from A Karate Christmas Miracle are here, with Candy Fox, the babysitter from that film, now playing the mother Cassandra. Knowing how important this movie is to her son, she trusts her drunken brother Ronald (Scott Schwartz, who was once in a majorly awarded Christmas movie and oh yeah, also did adult) and two of the actors — Chuck (Buddy Matthews) and Kitty Kat (Julie McCullough, who is not as deranged as she was in Del Vecchio’s last film, which both makes me happy and sad) — steal the film and want some money and maybe have a bomb and there’s a Mexican standoff ended by the kid all while dad is in the Congo battling the forces of Communism or Socialism and a five-second Google search would have told you that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a nominally centralized constitutional republic but then we’d be robbed of that endless POV shot of an old transistor radio being brought to the diner table of the villains.

The so-proclaimed movie so funny it’ll take a kid out of a coma and get his mother to stop singing Christmas carols in her sad house is actually Del Veccchio’s 2016 film Hospital Arrest which explains how Martin Kove, Jimmie Walker, Michael Winslow, Todd Bridges and Gilbert Gottfried can all be in this movie and Mario Del Vecchio still has top billing. I mean, if my son’s home movies of him wrestling were in a film, I’d put him ahead of those guys too.

IMDB tells us that “The lead actor, Mario Del Vecchio, is a real-life outstanding youth wrestler, as well as a standout football player” so that means that the fact that we didn’t get A Football Christmas Miracle this year means that either the elder Del Vecchio has run out of money, COVID-19 robbed us of  last year’s Kenneth Del Vecchio Hoboken International Film Festival where he gives awards to actors and then films scenes for his next movie or he’s decided to go back into politics.

This movie is under 70 minutes long with most of that footage coming from that other movie and then you get eleven minutes of credits which are mostly holiday songs punctuated by Mario Del Vecchio straight-up wrecking kids on the mat, imposing his will on them and crushing their need to live. Do they know it’s Christmas?

You can watch this on Tubi.

The ninth American Pie movie and the first with no Eugene Levy — finally too big for these movies — or any female nudity, American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules invents the original film and has four girls — in case you missed the title — by the names of Annie (Madison Petis), Kayla (Piper Curda), Michelle (Natasha Behnam) and Stephanie Stifler (Madison Broadway) who all make a pact to get what they want.

What do that want? Annie wants to lose her virginity. Kayla wants to know that she’s the only woman for her boyfriend. Michelle wants to find a boy that can deal with her love of Presidents and sex toys. And the female Stifler is dominating her principal. They all kind of want the nice guy Grant (Darren Barnet).

Director Mike Elliott is a sequel master, producing The Terror Within II, Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight, Bloodfist IV: Die Trying, Bloodfist V: Human Target, Casper: A Spirited Beginning, Casper Meets Wendy, Addams Family Reunion, Richie Rich’s Christmas Wish, Beethoven’s 5th, American Pie Presents: Band Camp, WarGames: The Dead Code, Beethoven’s Big Break, American Pie Presents: The Book of Love, Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball, Death Race 2, Blue Crush 2, Death Race 3: Inferno, The Little Rascals Save the Day, The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power, Kindergarten Cop 2, Honey 3: Dare to Dance, Bigger Fatter Liar, Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack, Bulletproof 2, Honey: Rise Up and Dance, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, Grand-Daddy Day Care, Undercover Brother 2, How High 2, Unbroken: Path to Redemption, The Prince & Me II: The Royal Wedding, Timecop: The Berlin Decision, Au Pair II, Turbulence II: Fear of Flying, The New Addams Family, Caged Heat 3000, Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom, Munchie Strikes Back, In the Heat of Passion II: Unfaithful, Carnosaur 2, The Unborn, Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III, Body Chemistry II: The Voice of a Stranger and Blackbelt II.

After the success of American Pie Presents: The Book of Love, writer David H. Steinberg was hired to write American Pie Presents: East Great Falls, a movie about four new male students at East Great Falls High School who all want to date the same girl. In 2017, Blayne Weaver was hired to gender swap everything.

Directed by Daniel Benedict (Bunni), who co-wrote the script with Casi Clark (they also worked on a short called Fall of Grayskull), The Bloody Man is an attempt to bring back the warm and gushy feelings of 80s horror. It stars Tuesday Knight (Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) and Lisa Wilcox (Alice Johnson in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child) to help you make that connection.

After the death of his mother, Sam (David Daniel) is having issues with his family, his friends, the bullies at his school, and most of all, the horrific Bloody Man, the comic book character that sustains him through bullying. In fact, his mother (Wilcox) gave him a Bloody Man action figure the very day she died in a car accident.

He also has to deal with Kim (Knight), his new stepmother, who he believes is slowly becoming possessed by his comic book antihero, an event that brings together his fractured family.

Between lengthy comic book animatics and plotting that keeps reminding us that Sam is being bullied at home and in school more than several times, the film drags at times. The closing — where the Bloody Man begins to imitate others — has some good tension, but it takes around two hours (!) to get there. That said, it’s fun seeing all the 80s toys and AEW/ROH wrestler Brian Cage as a copyright skirting He-Man character in a brief cameo (probably pulled from the aforementioned Fall of Grayskull short).

The Hold Steady may have sung, “I’ve survived the 80’s one time already and I don’t recall it all that fondly,” but it seems that so many films want to live in the past — trust me, I get it, slashers after 1983 are really hard for me to hold in any regard — versus moving toward the future. And the more you make a teen horror film with synth and blue/red gel lighting — well, at least on the poster — the more you’re going to get compared to Stranger Things than The Monster Squad.

That said — I did like The Lost Boys reference by calling the brothers Sam and Michael. With some pruning toward how much is in here, this would be a fine feature. As it is now, it’s not bad, but it does drag a bit before redeeming itself with a fun conclusion.

The Bloody Man is available on digital and VOD platforms as well as on DVD and blu ray — which comes with director’s commentary, bloopers, behind the scenes, trailers and promo videos and collector’s edition packaging with illustrated slipcover and a folded poster. You can get those from MVD.

Thanks to Wild Eye for featuring our review on the back of the box!